Creative Technologies

Speeches part 2

Today we had to speak in front of the class and define what ITS means to us.

ITS to me is bits and pieces of technology coming together as a coherent object with the creator showing an explicit meaning in how it is suppose to be interacted so there is no room for ambiguity.

Thats it.

My interest focused on future and modern technology, particularly in the fields of AI, cloud computing, data analysis and big data as I believe from all the talks I have been going to is heading. the beauty of it is that it looks like everything is very rudimentary clunky and new and everyone is saying it. But people are saying that this is the next revolution how machine learning is going to affect the mountain of unsorted and undocumented data. To me, this is what the people back in the 70s-80s about the Internet, with slow data speeds and major uncertainty and push back and some people going as far to calling it as fad. But the Ai space is a bit different, there are push back due to major uncertainty, with American Hollywood propagating a scary and misinformed information about the coming of Ai.

It isn’t skynet and one day will come and take over, that is incredibly unlikely to happen to the point of improbability.

A good example of Ai is a Bot or more specifically a chat bot. At one of the talk, an energy company here in New Zealand called Genesis Energy released a chatbot for their website to do basic things. Check balance, what services are available and on sale etc. All of these things that dont require a human. But if something is beyond the capabilities of the chatbot, it can then pass it off to a human that can do more specific things.

So instead of 10 people in a call center monitoring all the calls, we get most of the chat bots do the rest problems and then two or three do the specific things.

If this is concerning to you then I ask you this, here in New Zealand, companies are literally investing in expensive self checkout machines. Why? Isn’t the point of people shopping and then to go to a manned checkout to be more convenient than a self checkout?

Turns out people don’t want to talk to people and people are more likely to rely on checking their own items out without the interaction of a human. Shopping centers only need one person to look after a row of self check out machines instead of 5 that do the normal checkout but they are not fired, they are shifted around the place to do other things.

Another machine, although not Ai, the ATM was feared to be the killer of bank teller roles, but guess what, it just shifted the bank tellers to a more specialised role without needing to fire them

It is fear that is bred from ignorance and not knowing what it is and panicking already.